Largest minus largest-read is equal to 3.76 crore

24 July 2009

Television ratings are like the Bhagavad Gita for TV companies. They can read into it what they want to read out of it. Which is why each TV station claims to be No. 1 and still somehow turns out to be right in its own way.

Ditto, newspaper readership figures.

Round one of the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) is out, and to the surprise of nobody, India’s two biggest Hindi dailies—Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar—are both claiming no.1 status.

“IRS officially states that the redership of a single publication Dainik Jagran is higher than the readership of other publication groups,” screams the Jagran ad (below), which publishes 36 editions from 11 states and has claims “5.5 crore readers”.

In response, Dainik Bhaskar, which too publishes from 11 States but has 48 editions in three languages and claims “1.74 crore readers”: “That’s what makes us the largest read newspaper group.”